The Mãe Preta and the Pai João from an intraethnic perspective of the poet Bruno de Menezes

Abstract

This article aims to examine whether there is a poetic representation that challenges the imagery of Mãe Preta and Pai João as submissive enslaved black and symbols of Brazil’s false racial democracy. To this end, the poems Mãe Preta and Pai João, found in Bruno de Menezes’s work Batuque, will be analyzed through an intraethnic perspective, a concept developed by Quince Duncan (2019). Lélia Gonzalez’s (2020) interpretation of Mãe Preta and Pai João as agents of passive resistance is also fundamental to this analysis. The lyrical voice does not reproduce the myth of Pai João created by white enslavers, but instead portrays a man who, in his youth, was a capoeirista and grew old without having been enslaved. Mãe Preta is exalted by the poetic voice as an embodiment of African ancestry and is seen as important in the Africanization of Brazil’s sociocultural formation. By analyzing the intraethnic perspective present in Bruno de Menezes’s afro–latin american poetics, we observe a lyrical voice that connects with the Afro-diasporic collective, humanizing and re-signifying Mãe Preta and Pai João. This representation stands in opposition to the racist and colonizing discourse, deconstructing the imagery of submission and passivity imposed on both figures by the enslaving whiteness that sought to uphold Brazil’s myth of racial democracy.